Bux

An epitaph/editorial in homage to Roger Straus Jr. appeared in the NY Times on Sunday, May 30, 2004. The writer, Verlyn Klinkenborg, wrote of him as if he was the last of "the great editors and publishers who made publishing matter" and went on to say "He understood the difference between asking, 'Is it worth buying' and 'Can it be sold?'" Most publishing houses today are parts of large conglomerates and the view towards what is publishable is not much different than towards what can be sold on TV. It's not necessarily that books are less literate or appeal to the more illiterate, but that books which don't have mass appeal have less chance of finding a publisher today. Those books that would be lost on the list of titles coming from a major publisher, have a hard time finding a publisher or distributor who will do them justice. I would think there's a market in the U.K. where a local Guide Michelin is published. I'm less sure how marketable the book would be in the U.S. My guess is that half the copies would be sold in New York. The news that Michelin is likely to publish a guide to New York within the next two years might spur sales, but that's probably not a tie in Michelin wants to promote. Paul, thanks for your summary. Some of Remy's points are slam dunks and most of that doesn't seem to require inside information. Point #1 is however, a bit damning.

Busboy, thanks for that link. I forgot all about the little popular lesson in cross cultural understanding from Pulp Fiction. The funny thing is that if you've been to France, but have avoided McDo, when Vincent says they call a Quarter Pounder a "Royale with Cheese" you're likely to assume he's full of shit. One might well assume fromage would have worked its way into the name, but on the McDo France site, there it is--"Royale Cheese."

Thanks. Tataki? Your term or Manolo's? I believe that was balsamic vinegar not soy sauce in any case. In regard to Rogelio's post, I didn't find any references to Spanish dishes in this and perhaps more homage to rare tuna in New York than to tataki, except for the slicing and presentation. The bitter almond sorbet was a Spanish touch more than a reference to any dish for me. Overall this seemed an original creation with international references--a synthesized dish. Does that make it sound synthetic? That's not the connotation I want, but "fusion" already connotes a certain world style and Manolo is not part of that school in my mind.

Much of the humor and intellectual wit of nueva cocina is lost on the tourist. We often don't get to play the game and it's a loss I sense at times. For us, the ability to appreciate many dishes beyond their immediate taste appeal is limited. Fortunately, we have had some good visits to various parts of the country in recent years and there was an extended visit to Spain a long time before El Bulli was around. It may not help when the food is on the table, but a little research after the fact can be rewarding and helpful when posting. There was a fairly recent time when "a little research" would mark one as has having a strong interest, if not actually as a scholar. Today it's just a matter of searching Google for a minute or two. We've had pulpo a feira several times in Galica and once in New York where is was surprisingly good. The NY Spanish restaurant was quite interesting, but short lived. In spite of having had the dish four or five times however, I didn't remember it having potatoes. That's where the web search payed off. That, and in checking my spelling--the dish doesn't appear on the menu given to us at the restaurant. I should have double checked the spelling. I see you've spelled it "feira," while I wrote "feria." There are over five thousand Google entries for "feira" and only three thousand for "feria." I picked up our Spanish dictionary (that's research--picking up a book ) and found "feria," but not the more common "feira." Is that perhaps Galician or should I buy a better dictionary?

If I make seafood stock by boiling shrimp, lobster and crabs along with aromatics and then run it through a PUR water filter, would it be kosher? Would the filter remove all the taste? Where are the talmudic scholars when you want one?

I don't know that you can really know tapas until you've been to Spain. Once you've been to one part of Spain and understood the tapas there, it should be easy for you to explain them. As you travel to more regions, it will get harder. I believe I've had pizza rolls as tapas. Tapas can be hot, cold, eaten out of hand or require a fork, spoon or toothpick. In many tapas bars you can get a tapa, a racion and likely a demi racion as well. It's not uncommon to see a half dozen friends sharing a racion or stew or braised meat all eating from the same plate. There is no time of day when tapas are not possible, although not all bars are open all day. The great thing about tapas bars is that you can snack all day long in the more civilized parts of Spain. A slice of tortilla (the Spanish fritatta) or a ham sandwich is great for breakfast, although many Spaniards prefer toast with fresh tomato sauce and a little olive oil for breakfast. I've been in tapas bars close to midnight and many Spaniards have dinner by eating tapas, especially if they've had a large lunch. It's not just the tourists who eat tapas for dinner. Many tapas bars are holes in the wall with a limited selection. Others are full blown restaurants prepared to served meals or tapas at tables. There is no pattern to tapas. You may have to order them from a menu; you may have to point to a display case of bowls of food; or you may be able to just pick up a canape from a plateful on the bar. Various items may have different prices, or they may all be the same price. In either case, the bartender may keep your tab; you may have to pay for each order or round; there may be an honor system; or they may count toothpicks or skewers. Every region has many of its own tapas and its own styles of bars, but some things are common all over Spain. The tortilla is the most universal tapa, that and ham. In some parts of Spain, you will always get something to eat when you order a drink, even if it's just a slice of sausage or a few olives. Sevilla is reputed to be the city with the greatest tapas and the greatest variety. That may also be why it has so few recommended restaurants. For all that, San Sebastian is the place I'd want to be for tapas. In Barcelona there's been a trend for Basque style tapas, but the bars that advertise themselves as Basque seem only to be capitalizing on the Basque reputation. The more we see of tapas in Spain, and in the last few years we've driven the north in a zigzag route from Barcelona to Santiago de Compostela, and from Madrid through much of Andalusia and along the coasts of Murcia, Alicante and Valencia in the course of a half dozen or more trips, the less I am critical of anything that advertises itself as tapas, but doesn't remind me of Spain, for I wouldn't be surprised to find it the next time I visit Spain. In San Sebastian, we saw bars with awards for their creative tapas. Attention on all things gastronomic has been focused on Spain in recent years and not without reason. Spanish words are creeping into the way we talk about food, the way French ones have for hundreds of years. All snacks seem to qualify as tapas these days.

You raise a lot of interesting issues, but you also make false analogies. (Is there another kind?) You don't really believe most of your food is actually cooked by the chef even when he's there. Food in a great restaurant comes not from the hands of a chef, but from the teamwork of a brigade of trained and talented cooks in most great restaurants. When you dine at a great restaurant, you're paying to see the chef perform, you're paying to eat the best possible food the restaurant can serve. Should a famous singer be there when his songs are sung by someone else. Need a composer be on hand to better enjoy his music. During renaissance times, artists had pupils work on their canvases, yet these works are still held to be masterpieces. This is not a new concept or a revolutionary one. In the end, you're paying for the food you eat. Some chefs need to be in the kitchen for their own reasons and some need to be in the kitchen because they can't manage to organize and trust a staff. I draw the line on the quality of the food I'm served. If it doesn't suffer when the chef is off for a charity event in South America, I have all the more respect for his talents. At some point a chef with more than one restaurant becomes more than just a chef. At the same time, he may, or may not, become less of a chef. None of that will mean the food has necessarily gotten better or worse.

Well beer is my usual cafe boisson of choice and they advertise Kronenbourg 1664 on draught on their web site. There's no mention of wine and the espresso (or express) is listed as "Cafe Expresso" (sic). I could easly nurse a beer through the time it takes me to pick up my mail. I wonder how far their signal carries.

For years, Mrs. B. and I have taken notes during our most interesting meals, especially when we travel. Lately, we've been relying on an unobtrusive digital camera to quickly record the dishes. It's easier and less distracting to us while we're dining, but I find that I can look at our notes years later and remember the dish and the way it tasted, but that when I look at the photograph, I can't always indentify all the ingredients. We've also arrived at the point where we've not only had so many fabulous dishes, but that we can afford to have them in rapid succession. Another oddly vexing factor came into play on this trip. We're used to dining alone together. After a few days on the road, the meal at hand may be all we have that's new to talk about. At Las Rejas this year, we were joined by Victor and while the stimulating conversation made our lunch much more enjoyable, the individual dishes often passed without the same focused attention. Pedro's meal was soon after ours and we had some of the same dishes. So bear with me if I don't offer as much detail about each course. Our first course was a refreshing deconstructed gazpacho with a tomato sorbet. That crisp rising like a whiff of smoke is nothing more than a variation on melba toast--a paper thin slice of dry toasted bread. It was a common garnish in many good restaurants. Here it's an effective part of the decomposition as bread, either incorporated into the soup or as croutons, is often a part of gazpacho. A poached plump oyster on some gently spiced calabasa sauce with candied lemon peel was a repeat from last year's menu for us. Pedro's comment about being reminded of Blue Hill is interesting to me because this combination of seafood and fruit, with a touch of sweetness was a taste to which I took slowly. I credit Daniel Boulud for sending out comps of this sort of thing and when I wouldn't order it voluntarily. That's one of the things I like most about tasting menus, it confronts me with things I might not otherwise order. The other thing about a well composed tasting menu is that courses follow in such a progression as to support successive courses. The three snacks plate was next for us as well, but with a variation in the soup from Pedro's lunch. I rather liked the foie gras tea sandwich with spice bread that's over on the right. More seafood came next. It was a take on pulpo a la feria, octopus, potatoes, paprika and olive oil. Both the octopus and original recipe are from Galicia. Here Manolo deconstructs and reconstructs making a sauce with the red pepper, rather than dusting the slices of octopus tentacles, and adding a few snails. After our paella of rabbit and snails in Casa Paco, I connect snails with Alicante in the opposite corner of Spain from Galicia and it strikes me that at a table in Las Pedroneras in the center of Spain, it's a perfect gastronomic and geographic balance. Seared rare tuna has been somewhat of a cliché in New York. I don't see it that much in France and have no idea how common it is in Spain, but Manolo breathes life into what appears as sliced steak with lentils, baby greens and a savory sorbet whose flavor we can't quite put our finger on. Other factors contributing to our inability to recount details are the fact that we were given an old menu as a souvenir, rather than a current one as an aide-memoir and the fact that our menu seemed to have grown in size from last year when we only had two courses added to the seven on the regular tasting menu. Victor is a local and regular diner here at what's obviously the best restaurant anywhere near his vineyards as well as being on the way back to Madrid. There are numerous threads in the NY forum about how to obtain VIP treatment at any restaurant and the simplest method is showing appreciation for the food. Becoming a regular patron is the sure fire way. Here's where my memory really flags. I recall a cold cheese soup being poured into the bowl before Mrs. B had the chance to photograph it. I suspect we may be missing a soup, but this photograph appears to be of the cheese dish Pedro describes as "cream of cheese, with summer truffle (tuber aestivium), dried fruits and compoted tomato" and the one I raved about last year. Last year, we had the sopa de ajo 2002 caliente which may have been on the menu for a year, but was still new to us. This year we got the sopa de ajo 2004 frio and we felt like collectors of limited editions. Beginning with our dinner at El Bulli during the year of their 20th anniversary, we became aware of the practice of dating dishes. It's a sign of the times, or at least of the style of contemporary haute cuisine in Spain where there's a emphasis on creativity of the sort that can be documented and cataloged the way Adria is doing with his works. It's also about having a body of work like a painter or a sculptor. The dating and photographing of these culinary creations remind me of the way visual artists assemble a portfolio--the one they carry around to introduce themselves to gallery owners. At some point that portfolio takes on a life and importance of it's own in a bizarre way. An artist I knew once told me about his experience at being a visiting critic at a college with a respectable art department. He was in a student's studio surrounded by finished work and work in progress and the student pulled out his portfolio of slides to show. How different these stills of a career in progress are than the familiar signature dishes of not so distant time. Those dishes were sometimes repeated for a generation, but often they evolved and slowly changed forms. It's just an observation. I have no personal preference. On a subjective level, I think I liked the 2002 hot soup better than this year's cold model, but it was a cold rainy day for May and had the weather been nearly what it should have been that day, I might well have appreciated the cold version. At any rate the dish has been further deconstructed from last year's soup. The tomatoes are in the form of tomatoes not broth and the egg yolk is uncooked. I think the raw egg yolk may at the heart of my preference for the warm version. I don't know if we've captured that in the photograph, but the slice of ham is as I think it was last year--a crisp and brittle crumpled sheet, not unlike a dry baked sheet of phyllo dough. I'm not sure how they do that. Pedro, do you think they can do that in a microwave? I'm a Luddite in the kitchen. Fire is all I know. Our next course was a single raviolo of partridge with a rather delicate pasta shell, a rich stuffing that that seemed particularly Spanish for reasons I cannot quite put into words and a couple of slices of truffle. We thought perhaps the savory courses concluded with the unctuous boned pig's food, morels and asparagus that followed. We were wrong. Last year we finished with a boned lamb's foot. Served with a potato and red pepper garnish it seemed essentially Spanish. Perhaps the pig's foot was no less so, but the combination of morel and asparagus was a familiar one from France and the U.S. at this time of year. The sea bream that followed the meat seemed a little out of progression almost as if Manolo noticed that none of us were falling asleep and decided to slip in another savory dish or two. The herb infused oil outlining the Asian touch of the scored seared squid was quite effective. The last few dishes while effective in the tasting menu, would be equally successful as a larger portion in a traditional three course menu. The savory finale, as it was at three restaurants this trip, was a taste of excellent suckling pig with three fruit purees. I don't know if Spanish chefs are tied to their roots, or if it's just that Spanish diners won't believe they really know how to cook in the kitchen if they can't produce a perfectly juicy piece of lechon with a perfectly crisp skin. Desserts were blessedly simple, refreshing, satisfying and the kind of stuff that slips in between whatever else you've eaten thus far. That is to say that each of the three or four desserts, depending on how you count, was at least one of those things in turn. Oranges, fennel soup, blood orange foam and sorbet of red fruits. Some strawberries and creams. Coffee jelly with cream and what we recall as a delicate saffron custard with chocolate sorbet. Let's call that pair one dessert.

It doesn't bother me either. Let's call it poetic license.

Délicabar has been well received in this forum, but it's a very untraditional place and it seems more fit for a light lunch or snack than dinner. Generally speaking, smoking is less noticeable in fine expensive restaurants than in inexpensive ones. Maybe because people are paying more attention to their food, or may just because tables are further apart. I'd also agree that the fewer the tourists, the greater the amount of smoke. The real French smoke a lot. If you go into a restaurant full of locals and there's no smoke, those are not real locals. Much too much is made of eating where the locals eat. They eat where they can aford to eat and all too often they don't have much taste. Paris is an international city and the locals, to a great degree, are expats, and foreigners with good reasons to be in the city. One of those reasons is to eat well. Visitors spend more time searching out not only the best restaurants, but the best values as well. Too often I've seen tourists search out the little restaurant in a residential neighborhood in an out of the way part of Paris only to find themselves clueless about a menu they didn't understand and food they didn't want to eat as well as a staff unprepared to spend the evening at their disposal translating the menu and returning dishes to the kitchen while the regular diners waited patiently. Nevertheless, I am not without sympathy for your intentions. John Talbott's restaurant news digest is as good a place to find new restaurants which are less likely to have made the rounds of American publications. One of the problems with finding places known only to locals is that no city's restaurants are scrutinized by local and foreign press, as well as the restaurants of Paris. Paris is probably the number one travel destination and food is the number one topic in Paris. Every travel and food publication in the world is reporting on restaurants in Paris as soon as they open. I could make an argument for visiting Paris at just about any time of the year but I think May and mid September to mid October are the best times for a first trip. One thing to understand is that Paris is pretty far north and the days are long in summer and short in winter.

From a casual look at the menu as well as with the knowledge of the way quotation marks have been used by others (you are talking about quotation marks and not the brackets which enclose a parenthetic word or phrase, are you not?) I'd guess it was because The preparations or ingredients are being used in some highly imaginative way and that the author of the menu is taking some liberty with the generally accepted meaning of the word. "Oysters and Pearls" - You will not really get "pearls." "Confit" of Field Rhubarb - Although confit is used with great abandon by many chefs, you're not getting confit of duck or goose as might be implied by the word. I didn't see "haricot vert," but I didn't look very hard. I would add that Keller seems to use quotation marks where others might not. I can't explain why it's a "Cappuccino of Forest Mushrooms" and just a "Confit" of Tomato rather than a "Confit of Tomato" or "Capuccino" of Forrest Mushrooms.

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One could have made a bundle betting me that I'd ever post a link to McDo on this board. Here's the link to the McDonald's France site. They use pop up windows and/or frames. You'll have to click through to find the Wi-Fi locations. Click "entrez" on the homepage and click "Le Wi-Fi Chex McDo" under the "Guide des Restos" pull down menu. On the next page, click "suivez le guide!" Enter the départment number in the box on the next page (75 for Paris) and click "valider." Another screen will pop up with a scrolling list of about 27 McDo Wi-Fi locations in Paris. They say it's free. I have not yet had the chance to try it out. I'm also told that in addition to the (expected) frîtes and the (unexpected) wine, MoDo in France also serves espresso. Europe is such a civilizing influence.

From the hotel web site, although it's not that prominently displayed: The rooms, at least the larger more expensive rooms, look large, especially for Paris and we can assume that's the case if they have room for a child's bed to be brought in. It looks like a nice place.

I'm glad to see the fat of water fowl put in its rightful place. Foie gras is in that same place as duck and goose fat, by the way. I've long understood goose and duck fats to be chemically closer to olive oil than to butter. I'm not anything like an expert on fats. I only know enough to understand that many accepted "facts" have been discounted by Dr. Walter Willett through years of research at Harvard. A good book on the subject of fats is Fran McCullough's The Good Fat Cookbook. In it, she reports on Dr. Willett's work and does her best to rehabilitate the tropical fats--coconut and palm oil and establish trans fats as the villain. She also makes great distinctions between the various supposedly healthy oils and notes that heating even olive oil will produce trans fats. She goes on to say that highly processed oils are quite different from those that are cold pressed or expeller pressed, but that even those cold pressed oils in the health food stores go rancid faster than the naturually saturated fats which may in the end, be healthier for you. Clearly it's all confusing and I'm not explaining it very well because I don't have it well processed in my mind. I don't mean to take this thread off track and will invite those who want to continue a discussion on fats and oils to take it to the General food forum, but I thought it was worth offering a little information for thought here. I believe Dr. Montignac's diet is intended not just as a means of weight loss but for health as well and should appeal to people who might also be intersted in what's discussed in Ms. McCullough's book. [Disclosure, if needed: My daughter had a part in editing this book.]

In Spain, I thought it was a rip off for hotels to charge 12-15 euros for wi-fi. From my research on Paris, the going rate there, where fewer hotels have wi-fi, appears to be 25 euros a day. There's a McDo just a couple of blocks away from where I plan to stay that advertises free wi-fi. I may well become a habituee. I've been told the frîtes are good and they serve wine as well. Here in the states, I believe the wi-fi in Starbucks is not free.

Actually, they do understand, Bux. Everyone in the restaurant business in Spain is quite aware that some clients abhor stuff that's out of the 'international cuisine' mainstream. And leading the squeamish - the Americans, yes. 'Chicken, veal, Dover sole and maybe a steak' are the limits of many traveling Americans' tastes. So, Paco was really being nasty when he suggested we start with grilled snails. I suppose the majority of chefs, especially in areas that serve a great number of tourists are well aware than many tourists, especially, but not just Americans, are picky eaters. I'm always offended when the waiter asks if I know what it is I'm ordering when I order offal. At the same time, I'm always disappointed when he doesn't. Here in New York City, intrepid diners my age have grown up hearing waiters in Chinatown respond to their orders by saying "you won't like that." I wonder how my food likes and dislikes would have been different if the first waiter to hear me order an andouillette told me what it was exactly that I was ordering. I really had no idea, I only knew it was a local sausage. I suspect I would not have ordered it had I known it was tripe. Fortunately, in northern Burgundy, no one suspected it was a strange food at the time.

From time to time we get caught up in those large town parties when we visit our friends who live near Béziers. These are parties in the town squares where they set up tables and benches and there is much food and wine and music. Neither the food, nor the wine, nor even the music is very good, but the joie de vivre is first class. Montpellier is where we've often picked up our car to set out to visit our friends. The Triangle, is the area adjacent to the place de la Comédie and I've described the way in which it meets the older city as an abrupt collision, something on the order of a trainwreck. Admittedly, trainwrecks have an element of morbid fascination. Anyway, that's precisely where our hotel was. It's a hotel that's changed hands and names several times since. "Disorienting" is an understatement, but having spent my earlier years searching for, and demanding, the tradional and the quaint, I now find I have some fascination for the way Europeans have lept into the future quite blind it seems, to the mistakes we've made. Being disoriented is also one of the fascinations of travel. At risk of sounding like one who enjoys stereotyping, I have to say that Europeans love baths, while Americans prefer a shower. I have a hard time convincing innkeepers and deskclerks that I really prefer a room with a shower to one with a bath, especially in France where there's often never been a "proper" shower curtain. Things are better these days, or I'm staying in more luxurious digs, and I'm finding better protection against flooding the bathroom floor while I shower. I've not had the pleasure of spending time in Atlanta, so I can't comment on the relative merits of its restaurants or how they might compare to those in Montpellier, but I am hooked on trying not only local food as I travel, but sampling the creative work of those chefs who have made an international reputation for themselves. it's not so much a matter of the food being better or worse than back home, but of having the opportunity to enjoy that unique restaurant. I suppose it's a hobby and it's become a good part of the reason I bother to travel at all. In many French cities, the best restaurant in town is the reason to visit.

My first thought is that this is a difficult concept to get across cultures. What is not strange to your wife may be food that is consdered strange to a foreign chef. I once had an alergist suggest I avoid foreign foods. That was a relief, I thought he was going to suggest a restricted diet. What is strange is subjective and what is foreign is only relative to what you already know. I have nothing but sympathy for your wife in regard to allergies, but to shut oneself off from "strangely" prepared foods is to limit one's contact with strange places and restrict oneself to the familiar. It's a bit of a road block to enjoying travel. Nevertheless, it should not come as a surprise if a Spanish chef doesn't understand that snails, tripe or sweetbreads may be strange food to someone. Cod, by the way is a fish I've found to be exquisite in Spain. I've had it most simply prepared in Ca L'Isidre.

Thanks for that post. We know Montpellier from several visits. That end of the Mediterannean is full of new towns that serve to provide summer places. they're not my cup of tea, but we've spent a night or two in one or the other of them. In spite of the placelessness of them, they can offer a sense of town. One weekend night we happened to find ourselves in one, I think it may have been Narbonne-Plage, the beach town that sprung up east of Narbonne. There was a portable band stand and a local band on a wide plaza in the cement walk adjacent to the beach. Everyone was out dancing and I mean everyone. Teens were as amorous as one could be in a public plaza and there were the older couples as well as kids dancing with their grandmothers. It was like a Norman Rockwell painting of a small town on the fourth of July. Traveling fairs with rides and amusements also make the rounds. The reality is not always as hard as it appears, but I miss the quaint fishing villages. Good stuff. Generally from Normandy or Brittany. Montpellier, as you've mentioned, can be a delightful place for the pedestrian, but a nightmare for the driver. We once rented a car at the railway station and asked for directions to our hotel, downtown and not far away. After much staff discussion, the general agreement was that I couldn't get there from where we were. There's an area where the new and the old collide for which it's almost impossible to draw a map. There are streets and roads crossing each other at several levels. The pedestrian access to our hotel was on new extension to the old pedestrian plaza, but the drive-up entrance was on the ramp out of the parking lot. It was only after driving around and around and taking the entrance to the underground parking lot by mistake and then making a quick exit that we found the "front" entrance to the hotel. In spite of all that, we rather like Montpellier. We've eaten well at the three star Jardin des Sens, in Montpellier, when it was a two star restaurant, but have been hearing mixed reviews since our last meal there. I don't quite understand how I could be hearing such reviews while the restaurant continues to hold its rating. Friends who live in the region, actually just north of Béziers, just wrote: can report that we finally had an excellent resto meal, at Cellier-Morel (Maison de la Lozere) in Montpellier. It was for S's birthday lunch, and we ate outdoors in the lovely courtyard, and the food was amazingly good. We drank 2 super wines: a Mas de Daumas Gassac Blanc, and a Peuch-Haut (Pic St-Loup) red. The Hotel du Parc seems to be a distance from the center of town. Would one need a car? I was sorry to hear that Blais closed. From what I've read on eGullet, it seemed very interesting, but the tall shot glass presentation has been around for quite some time before it appeared at Blais.

That link takes me to the cerfeuil page where there are links to three recipes. I believe they use frames so that the URL displayed doesn't change for each recipe.

I think it is chervil. Yes it is, although I seem to recall cerfeuil as a more common spelling. Photograph here, although the scale may be deceiving. In Lucy's photograph of the fish, the large leaf appears to be parsley and the sprig with the smaller leaves is chervil. Lucy will us if I'm wrong.

I have to say I was generally disappointed by Commander's Palace, more by the service and attitude than by the food, but that is a bread pudding that needs to be placed in some other category if only to allow some light to shine on other bread puddings. Is is, as they say, "something else."

Sweet bread puddings need a sauce like ice cream needs a sauce, which is to say that it doesn't need a sauce one bit, but may become something special with a sauce. For a simple family meal, a sauce may seem inappropriate, while a fancy dinner party may call for a sauce to make it special. Savory bread puddings will usually soak up whatever sauce comes with the meat if it is a garnish. If it were such an interesting bread pubbing that it arrived as it's own course, I'd be more tempted to served it with a sauce, but the sauce would be chosen on the basis of the other ingredients in the savory pudding. I wouldn't expect a pudding of just bread, milk and eggs to stand on its own as a course--probably not even with a sauce, unless that sauce was beef stew or something.